()blivion
Active Member
The interesting thing is I explained what was happening to Kevin at OnePCBSolution.com, one of the companies who do the board + ROM swaps and he kindly replied with "To be honest, I don't think your drive has a circuit board problem.
How exactly did you explain the problem to him? Because, from what I know, having or not having the drive show up in BIOS is entirely the effect of board firmware. It doesn't have anything to do with the disk and it's integrity. It's the first step in the process, and is very low level. It would be hard to imagine that a disk problem could make the board SoC unable to tell your system who and what it is. Unless of course it was so bad that the motor/arm load exceeded specs to the point that it messed with the rest of the electronics.
I would try a board swap. Don't even bother swapping the chip, just the whole board. If it's not at least recognized in BIOS, then maybe his point is valid. Then again, you DID buy a used sacrificial HDD, which potentially had board problems of it's own.